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Saturday, November 12, 2011

What's the difference

I enjoy working with Apex. However one challenge is that it doesn't sit too well with conventional source control systems. Plus the fact that not all organisations use source control systems, especially for the small departmental applications which are a particular sweet spot for Apex.

One item in my little library of scripts is based on the ApexExport utility. This is part of the main Apex install which you'll probably find on the server. If you don't have access to the server (and some DBAs are understandably cautious about that) ApexExport is also available as part of the Apex Listener. That's a much more compact download, and I've based my script on that.

The Apex Listener download is a zip file. When you unzip it you get a WAR file. If you unzip the WAR file, you find the "apex.jar" file, which is what you need. If you like playing Russian dolls, you can even unzip the JAR file into the class files, but I don't see the point.

My Apex diff script simply extracts the same application (based on the id) from two Apex workspaces and does a compare of the results. This is handy to see if the version in a development workspace is the same as that in Testing/Production (eg has another developer done some work on it). An alternative use case is to ensure that no-one has been sneaking unapproved amendments into Prod.

My script is a zip because downloading BAT files is often blocked. It is trivially small, so the code is shown below too.

I've been lazy and hard-coded the username password here. Feel free to replace them with more parameters. Similarly with directory names, and you can replace the MS-DOS "fc" call with one to your favorite diff utility. I've used ExamDiff for a long time and my preferred editor, PsPad has one built in as well.